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Business firms are getting more aware and determined about Cyber Intelligence and Threat Mitigation service. In today`s world where in a connected ecosystem technology has eased lives and brought business to our fingertips. This ease of business also has a flipside as it gives this ease of access to not only the good guys but also the bad ones. There are big underground markets where hackers are furbishing kits to create identities, foster scams and eyeing credit cards & other frauds.

Search engine marketing is the fastest growing medium that marketers are using to promote products and services online. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Bing Ads & Baidu. Search Campaign management can be achieved directly with the SEM vendor, third party tools or with the services of a digital marketing firm/ advertising agency.

E commerce business has set new prominence and records for online community. The market has grown with a rocket speed and changed the mind-sets of people bringing their confidence towards Online shopping. According to Forbes, “For the full year it estimates that US ecommerce will generate $262.3 billion in sales, an increase of 16.4% year over year and slightly higher than the 16.2% increase last year. By 2017 eMarketer estimates that there will be $440 billion in sales for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.8%”.

“Call to Action - CTA” is a necessity for any website, commercial or an advertisement. It could be a button, banner, type of graphic, or text which produces an urge in the mind of the viewer or reader prompting him to click on it.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is an encrypted protocol to provide secure communication over the internet. The protocol has widespread use in various applications like web browsing, e-mail and Voice over IP. It was developed by Netscape and has seen 3 versions of it being released SSL 3.0 being the latest.

The internet is widely littered with “WordPress vs Drupal” discussions with some favoring Wordpress while others Drupal. However there cannot be a simple comparison that can be drawn between the two as the underlying assumption that both are serving exactly identical requirements is flawed. Wordpress is a content management system (CMS) while Drupal is an application framework that has a CMS built into it.

Drupal has emerged as one of the most popular open source content management system that has insisted huge number of web developers to be a fan of its enhanced core modules, powerful web designing templates and add-ons. Over the time, Drupal has been serving large business and organisationalwebsites with its upgraded content management system solutions.

Panda and Penguin have transformed from lovable animals to inescapable algorithms which can flutter anyone using inappropriate content in the website. Online businesses today require SEO experts to implement effective online marketing strategies. A few years back keyword based SEO did the trick but now rich and apt content is also required for brand promotions & customer engagement.

December is here and the year is passing by. The team at Green Bird Media, one of the best Website design and development firms in San Diego, decided to look back at the webdesign and development trends that took over the show in 2014 and to have a sneak peek at what 2015 could bring in.

Recently, San Diego has become a hot bed of entrepreneurs and small businesses, due to the blend of economic factors, consumer trends and the business ecosystem that exists in the city. A recent article in Forbes magazine, has cited San Diego as one of the best cities in US to start business and we cannot rule out the role of the web development companies in San Diego contributing to the fact.

A new non-profit website CaliforniaGroundWater.org by San Diego Web Design Company Green Bird Media, was launched recently to start the process of educating the public. The goal of the new website is to create awareness of California State & Local Officials to Groundwater Resources about the role Groundwater plays in providing a safe & reliable water supply for California and sustain our economy.

This article is for experienced Drupal installer and not for someone new to Drupal and/or Oracle. It is assumed that you know how to install Drupal in the standard format on Mysql. Installing Drupal on Mysql is straight forward. The M of LAMP stack (or WAMP) is Mysql which is default database engine that Drupal supports.

My goal is to get to the point where Drupal install lists out the option of selecting Oracle as the database in addition to the standard Mysql database option. When you download Drupal version and get to installing, after the first 3 steps:

Life Song for Women, a leader in Bible Study for Young Girls & Women, unveiled its redesigned non profit website, www.lifesongforwomen.org, as part of an integrated campaign designed to educate and encourage attendance of the Workshops offered.

We at Green Bird Media are Proud to be Launching Aseptic-Process.net, a new central resource for providing the latest important information, industry trends, articles, regulatory and FDA requirements pertaining to pharmaceutical and other aseptic processing. This new website provides quick & easy links to valuable information & discussion areas, all in one place to help you navigate the aseptic processing standards in the industry.

Green Bird Media recently made the upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 on our company website, GreenBirdMedia.com. We were one of the hold-out Drupal Design Shops, with a website that had wanted to make the jump straight from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. After much discussion, debate and eventually deciding that it could cost far more in the long haul, the Drupal Web Design Team at Green Bird Media started the process with a complete assessment. It came down to Drupal 6 will soon be deprecated after the upgrade & launch of Drupal to version 8.

1. Just because they are non profit doesn't mean they don't have money for a website

Non profits often have portion of their budget set aside for marketing, and much of this can be used to develop a website, especially if the website offers interaction and social media integration to improve their reputation and reach.

Popular Non Profit Organizations and How They Use Drupal Web Design

Drupal web design has become one of the top contenders in the online market today. Not only has Drupal increased in popularity with mainstream companies, but it's also being used by some of the biggest non-profit organizations. Some of the Drupal for non profits adoptersinclude internationally recognized organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Over the years we've helped several businesses launch with great success. Here are our suggestions for a "best practice" list, but of course there are many more!

1. Start with a Business PlanSCORE provides low-cost, high-value classes to help business start with a business plan. This is your financial and structural blueprint. The high rate of business failures are mostly due to folks skipping this step. At the very least, talk to the most skeptical person you know about your business idea and let them shoot holes in it.

Although we often take the reins and guide our customers through our structured process, not all design firms work in that manner. Many of the frustrations companies experience can be mitigated with some thoughtful planning on the front end. Here are a few suggestions on how to speed up and clarify your needs:

We often see customers after they have had one or two failed and expensive design launches. As a rule, we can usually see that the problems were built into the hiring or communication process right from the start. We thought we would share some great strategies and tips on how to hire a web design team that will suit your organizational needs.

We at Green Bird Media, a San Diego Web Design company are pleased to announce the recent website launch of: CaminoDeSantiagoForSeniors.org/ detailing their Epic Journey across Europe for Self Discovery & Church. This great pilgrimage is detailed in a day-to-day journal kept by Bonnie Clapp, while traveling with her husband Nick. They walked 1,100 miles from Central France to Western Spain, and then to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.

We sent our Drupal & Front-end Developer, Chuck Dowe, over at the Hilton Pasadena located northeast of Los Angeles last weekend for GLADcamp 2014. It was great to see the big turnout this year: 250+ people. The Hilton provided great Wifi, Note Pads, Pens, Water and more for attendees. This year the camp was focused on "Drupal for Good" with Non-Profits as the key focus.

We sent our Drupal Developer, Chuck Dowe, over at the Marina Village Conference Center located on the Warm and Sunny San Diego Beaches last weekend for SANDCamp 2014. It was great to see the big turnout this year: 350+ people. Green Bird Media Sponsored the Drupal Community this year as a Community Sponsor of SANDCamp 2014. The mornings were brisk, but quickly warmed by the Coffee / Barista stand on the meeting area. It was a nice weekend of web development & networking with fellow Drupal Developers.

Green Bird Media is delighted to announce that after months of hard work and collaboration, the official launch of Indevia Accounting’s brand new IPC Member’s support website. This new portal will allow members of the Independent Purchasing Cooperative to see the information specific to their needs. We worked with the internal & consulting teams that Indevia Accounting brought onto the project to refine the message.

We recently were approached by a long-time client about combining or integrating his vTiger CRM account with a "Get a Quote" form on his Drupal Website. The idea was that the lead had to be entered into the CRM for someone to follow up on, so lets see if we can remove a step of data entry being done twice or errors in the entry by having the data passed to the CRM directly. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Services are the best and the most efficient approach for building & maintaining relationships with your customers, so find the perfect fit was essential.

We are super excited to announce the launch of a new pre-school website for All Saints' Episcopal Pre-school here in San Diego! It will give them an immediate upgrade from the old HTML-based basic pre-school website and bring loads of new features to Staff & Parents.

As a Franchise Business Owner do you have too much accounting paperwork or payroll reports?

Does your operation need an accounting firm that can work by your side? Indevia.com underwent a redesign & content focusing process that made Green Bird Media, a San Diego Web Design company, develop the perfect Website Solution to get Business Owners quickly connected to Indevia Accounting.

The San Diego Web Design Firm, Green Bird Media worked hand-in-hand with Emily Mace, Director of Harvard Square Library, to design and develop a content management solution that was right for their organization. We came together to plan the content architecture, decide on the best CMS (content management system) for the job, and give the users of Harvard Square Library a great experience.

We sent our Developer/Themer, Chuck Dowe, up to at the conference center of the University of California - Irvine last weekend for DrupalCampLA 2013. It was great to see the big turnout this year: 400+ people. Part of the reason Green Bird Media enjoys Drupal so much is community of people using Drupal. The community support is just getting better & better. It was a weekend of web development madness & networking.

To be an outstanding firm, it starts on the inside. Flood Masters staff is specifically selected for the quality of their skills, professionalism and personal integrity. We here at Green Bird Media, a San Diego Web Design Company, take that same approach and were delighted when Flood Masters selected us to rebuild and redesign their website into a Content Management System.

INCOSE was in need of a fresh new look and an easy way to update their website. Although the current site sdincose.org was functional, there were short comings. Being a tech savvy organization, they understood the need to implement a better Content Management System (CMS). When GBM was given the privilege to respond to a RFP, Green Bird Media strongly suggested using Drupal.

Many of our clients here at Green Bird Media - a Web Design San Diego company, have come to us with the issue of not being able to see the updates they have made to their own website. We have found that there could be several reasons for this and several easy ways to fix the issue. Sometimes it's as simple as pressing the refresh or reload button on the internet browser you are using to dumping your internet browsers cache. Don't know what that is?

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

Not many people know the difference between a WordPress site hosted on WordPress.com or a self hosted WordPress.org site. There are some articles you can find on the internet doing a google search to help you understand it better, and a few videos as well.

Vista Films International came to us here at Green Bird Media, a premier San Diego Web Design Firm, needing to brighten up the look of their new movie "Refuge From The Storm" website. We gave the site a face lift with new brighter graphics as well as a new Word Press Blog page where they can share thier experiences after watching this award winning movie.

Auto Fraud Legal Center chose to go with Green Bird Media among 4 other companies to change up their old and outdated straight HTML website to something that is "NOW". They needed something that could grow with them. The choice was easily made that the Drupal content management system is the way to go for its ease of use and SEO friendliness. Rosner, Barry & Babbitt, LLP is the Auto Fraud Legal Center. For over 25 years they have fought for the rights of consumers who have been taken advantage of by auto dealers.

As a Small Business Owner do you have bookkeeping troubles or payroll pains? Do you have an experienced attorney by your side? Are you maximizing all of your tax benefits? SBPNow.com is a new Website Developed by Green Bird Media to provide Small Business Owners with the essential services needed to help them achieve their business goals!

1) CMS: Content Management System - Manage content yourself and eliminate a majority of web admin fees - You have the ability to assign user roles. Give different departments control over the content that pertains to them, give an Intern or Employee the ability to update and add content in certain areas on your website or just have one Web Admin that can do it all. It’s your choice!

Anza-Borrego Foundation is the nonprofit cooperating association for Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Paige from ABF came to us here at Green Bird Media asking for a new blog so they could update the members and non-members alike about important information regarding their foundation, land and wildlife conservation, and up and coming events in and about the park. We built them an awesome new blog using Drupal Views that you can check out and get informed at TheABF.org/Blog !!

San Miguel Fire District wanted to provide it's citizens and customers with easy to access information about their Divisions and the services they provide. To make that happen San Miguel Fire District came to Green Bird Media, a premier San Diego Web Design Firm, to redesign their site from plain old fashioned HTML to a robust custom themed Drupal based CMS website. The design went from bland to BAM, an eye catching and informative website. You can see from the before and after examples below.

Green Bird Media recently completed a new web design for Commercial Lease Advocates, a law firm specializing in lease negotiation for commercial properties. The client wants to use the website as a marketing tool and information base for potential clients. This particular clientele may or may not know that lease negotiation is a way to reduce their fixed costs. Commercial Lease Advocates looked to Green Bird Media to create a welcoming and informative website to spread the word about commercial lease negotiations.

The people of My Home Improvement Winnipeg were looking for a custom solution to help local businesses in the home improvement industry offer their services online. Green Bird Media, a San Diego based web development and design firm came up with this custom solution using our skills in Drupal development and design. Visitors of the site can find local Winnipeg companies that do anything from air conditioning to windows and everything in between using the custom built search form and read about these companies on the custom profile pages within the site.

French American Culinary & Hotel Institute Inc is a San Diego based company promoting 'Mastering French Pastry' cooking courses. These wonderful series of books were created by the world famous French Chef Christian Forais partnered with Muriel Schiffmann.

Topics include mastering the art of classic and international pastry, high-tea and coffee cake confections, plus many more! Green Bird Media, a San Diego based web design company was awarded with the honor of creating this website.

The people at Bois Loisirs had an exact idea on what they wanted in a website, and the people at Green Bird Media, a San Diego Web Design company - made it come to life with our skills in Drupal development and design implementation. We took their design ideas and made it tangible. This site is presented in the French language. Bois Loisirs has specialized for 20 years in manufacturing custom-made wood based building projects. They offer a wide range of high quality products & designs.

Travel is fun, but travel planning is hard - NOT ANY MORE with our new launch of Triplark.com. Anjali being a travel enthusiast had this idea of making travel planning easy, intuitive and informative to all travelers. Anjali Thulajpurkar contacted Green Bird Media after being referred to them by a previous client. Green Bird Media is a San Diego Web Design company known for its Drupal Website expertise at reasonable costs.

Keven Jefferey, Digital Technologies Librarian from San Diego State University (SDSU) contacted Green Bird media to revamp and turn the SDSU library website into an easily editable, crisp looking, and up to date with current market trends. A leader in Drupal CMS websites, Green Bird Media was the winner among other website designers from San Diego and other parts of California.

National Provider Compliance Corporation came to San Diego Web Design firm Green Bird Media with a need to update the look of their website and make their site SEO Compliant using our Drupal Development services. National Provider Compliance Corporation (NPCC) is a private medical practice management training company that is committed to providing quality, relevant, and affordable continuing education to health care providers throughout the U.S. The principals of National Provider Compliance Corporation have been in the business of health care practice training since 1982.

Bayview Hunters Foundation had come to Green Bird Media to redesign their website, and with that redesign they also needed a mobile version. We used Drupal to build this non-profit organizations mobile site which you can see here: m.BayViewCI.org/ it incorporates all the important information and links that are needed. You can go to this site using any cell phone with web access, and it looks great on iPhones, Androids and other smart phones.

nanoComposix is an early stage Research & Development company that came to Green Bird Media, a San Diego web design firm to update their web presence with a complete overhaul of their site. We moved their website content from a Joomla based website to a Drupal site and designed the look and feel. The new website design is easy to navigate, update and best of all it looks slick! Check out the before and after shots below and you will see what Green Bird Media web design in San Diego can do for your next project!

St. Andrew’s Episcopal came to Green Bird Media a San Diego based Web Design company to make a new website design to replace an out dated look. St. Andrew’s was really looking for a clean and up to date design. Using a CMS based Drupal website makes it easy for anyone within the churches organization to update, be it news, a recap of a sermon given, add an event to the calendar and so much more. Visitors to the site can go to the Media Gallery and check out the Bulletins, Newsletter, Photo Galleries, Press & News, Sermons, Video Gallery.

Green Bird Media decided to give the current site a little freshening up, or as I like to say some new feathers. Much went on behind the scenes to improve usability and performance, but the biggest change that you’ll notice is the look. Navigating around this Drupal based website is easy and user friendly. Check out the before & after screen shots below.

NEHMAR is a brand new company where the mission is to provide NMA Members with a centralized resource to address their needs for Health Information Technology (HEALTH IT) solutions. With a new company, they would need a new website. NEHMAR decided to use Green Bird Media (a San Diego Drupal Web Design Company) to create a robust web presence using our Drupal development and design services. They also gained the high possibility of saving a ton of time and money with how easy it is to keep their Drupal based website up to date!

Bayview Hunters Point Foundation is a non profit human services agency serving southeast San Fransisco (CA). The Bayview organization has a mission to build a community that is empowered, clean, safe and healthy. With the help of Green Bird Media's non-profit web design experience, Bayview Hunters Point Foundation received some "fresh paint" to their website www.BayViewCI.org. There is also a mobile version available at m.BayViewCI.org.

The Grant Humanitarian Foundation’s mission is to care for America’s military men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. To help further this noble cause, Green Bird Media created an online community enabling members of the military to receive support from other veterans and workers from The Foundation.

While creating a non profit web design, we find that the multimedia needs are growing while the budgets for additional staff and support is shrinking. We help deploy many 3rd-party plugins that work well with a new content management system.

SermonPlayer is a powerful online tool that easily allows audio and video content to be added to a website. These files can then be archived, downloaded in multiple formats and subscribed to. Keep your visitors returning to the website for fresh content with each sermon or special event.

EPIBI Nursing Pads are skin-friendly and developed by a physician for nursing mothers. These antimicrobial pads are naturally contoured to wick away moisture and make life more comfortable during the stressful days of raising young children.

Dr. Hann came to Green Bird Media because she needed an easy way to manage her online store. She already had a store that wasn't easy to use or make changes to. Green Bird helped her seamlessly transition to a Drupal e-commerce website.

Constant Contact is the easiest and most professional way to send a newsletter. At Green Bird Media, we don't think of ourselves as "web programmers." Sure, we develop and program websites. We love it, and it is a core component of our business.

But Green Bird Media is more than that. Green Bird Media is about helping people share all that is special about businesses and non-profit organizations with the world. There are many avenues to marketing to the world online, and one of those is sending an email newsletter.

Drupal, an open source CMS widely used in web development, has ways to easily enable the construction of all common aspects of a commercial web site, including one of the most important: online shopping. Any organization seeking to sell products and build an associated community via the web, enable paid access to premium content or paid file downloads among other commercial transactions, needs an eCommerce solution. Drupal and Ubercart together make an unbeatable combination for creating and maintaining a sustainable and easy shopping cart.

** Update (02/07/11): Chris Brookins, VP of Engineering and Product Management at Acquia sent a note with clarifications to our original article regarding Drupal Gardens' offerings. The most important point is that Drupal Gardens is still in beta, development is under way, and the information in this article isn't final. **

Drupal Gardens is a hosted, self-contained setup of the Drupal 7 content management system. It is an appropriately named walled garden, allowing non-technical people to easily build websites with powerful features.

Ever wish someone would go through the thousands of mom related websites to let you know what’s great and what’s not worth your time? Someone has! Dot Coms For Moms is the newest website from Drupal developers Green Bird Media dedicated to saving moms time and money online. From healthy Holidays to road tripping with the family in style, Dot Coms for Moms covers it all.

Since 1987, Social Model Recovery Systems has provided help and support for members of our community who need it most. Their new nonprofit Drupal website launched by San Diego web design firm Green Bird Media provides Social Model the tools they need to keep their community updated.

Featured prominently in the sidebar are the upcoming trainings and community events, an often updated tool that keeps employees and community members up to date.

As new technologies gain acceptance, they become mainstream. Drupal’s been exhibiting this trend for some time as more corporate entities chose to launch or re-launch web sites using Drupal as their CMS. A CMS (content management system) enables users to store, create and use content on the web more efficiently and easily than HTML coding, and Drupal is the leading open source CMS.

Cophec, Community Pharmacy Health Clinics, is the new website built in Drupal and launched from San Diego web design firm Green Bird Media. Cophec works with independent community pharmacies to help leverage their core values. Cophec also consults with independent community pharmacies to support their participation in the trend of pharmacy retail clinics.

Managers at all levels understand the importance of launching a web site that’s easy to navigate and relevant to users. They also appreciate the value of loading the site with fresh, meaningful, and interesting content. But most importantly, they see that all of that time will be wasted if desirable prospects and users don’t find the site. SEO seeks to make sites pop off the search engine results pages to users you most want to attract. Drupal, an open source content management system excels at enabling business owners and non-profits to create and maintain SEO-friendly web sites.

Web developers code many functions and features into a web site to create a smooth flowing user experience. Among the most critical are queries, which present content to the user.

Queries might be used in a product catalog, a collection of images, a site map, search function or many other common web site features. Coding each query alone requires significant time, even for simple adjustments. This can dramatically increase the time and cost of making changes. However, Drupal offers tools which make the arduous task much easier: views.

While we at Green Bird Media weren't zooming across the cool waters of Mission Bay by our own power, our friends at the San Diego Rowing Club gave us quite an introduction to their fine pastime while developing their new website.

With their boathouse nestled along the Mission Bay shoreline, the SDRC needed a website to act as a community gathering place for the times their members can't be there.

Here are some features and examples of the ways San Diego Rowing Club members and non-members interact on their new Drupal website:

An effective web site occupies a key place in any organization’s marketing strategy and web presence. Managers can't ignore the power of the Internet when it comes to communicating with constituents and attracting new prospects or donors. Having budgeted for the initial design, hosting, and launch of the web site, that same careful manager needs to consider longer term maintenance costs and how to defray them to keep the web site current and meaningful. Drupal can help reduce these costs going forward.

Last month the Drupal development community converged on Copenhagen for three days of learning and sharing. The organizers provided users with various venues to present and comment on each other’s work: keynote sessions; presentations; panel discussions; birds of a feather groups; the core developer summit where users could share ideas directly with Drupal’s main contributors; and the coding lounge. Taken together, these sessions allow for a three day Drupal intensive.

Drupal.org and the developers who maintain the Drupal core take their open source roots very seriously, working hard to engage the user community in all aspects of development. While they communicate in many ways, nothing surpasses face to face communication and so they offer periodic conferences where global users can congregate and learn from each other. Later this month, one of the bigger conferences, DrupalCon, opens in Copenhagen.

RF Exposure lab is a statewide leader in SAR testing and related services. What is SAR testing, and why is it so important? According to the experts at RF Exposure, it is "the unit of measurement for the amount of radio frequency (RF) absorbed by the body when using a wireless device." Sounds important now, doesn't it? We're the first in line to thank Tamara and Jay, who is a consultant for the FCC's standards body, for what they do.

Drupal, an open source Content Management System, boasts an extremely active user community, which gathers periodically at conferences all over the world. Los Angeles recently hosted DrupalCamp and the global conference in Copenhagen opens in late August. More importantly, users contribute modules to add features and capabilities to the Drupal core. Because these modules are user driven, they appear on no set schedule. However, the Drupal community currently awaits the latest update to the Drupal core, Drupal 7, due in Beta any time.

Every Monday we get asked about our weekend by our colleagues and typically struggle to respond with more than a shrug and, “Oh, fine.” Well, after the weekend of August 7 and 8, our own Rick Wagner and Chris Bauer offered a great response: they went to DrupalCampLA2010.

During their recent visual refresh, our friends at Thunder SEO moved their content management system from WordPress to Drupal. They leverage Drupal to display more types of content to site visitors and provide versatility and power for their online storefront. Besides just blog posts, Thunder's Drupal web site includes Thunder Booms, a special section separating the team's favorite tips and articles every week. Their site also puts a special focus on individual members of the team.

A Brief History Of The Drupal Open Source Community

Diversifying revenue streams for any organization can ensure survival in a down economy. As a recession deepens and spending tails off, all players in the marketplace suffer. For a non-profit, these macro economic conditions can endanger management’s ability to support core functions and ultimately, perhaps even jeopardize the basic mission. A careful non-profit manager then needs to take steps to insulate the organization from such drastic results.

Webmasters design and build websites in a dizzying array of categories, featuring different page types and functions. But for purposes of comparison, we can group websites into a limited number of broad types: eCommerce, membership, corporate, non-profit or not-for-profit, for example. Websites belonging to the same category or type would share certain characteristics, or functional requirements.

How Drupal for Non Profits an Help to Create an Effective Viral Campaign.

Effective management of non-profits requires efficient use of resources. Where a private company buys services to achieve strategic or operational goals, non-profits can employ open source solutions to prevent draining critical dollars away from the core mission(s). Viral marketing plays a key role in executing against your communications strategy; a careful manager harnesses the power of the web and social networks.

Content Management Systems Save Small Businesses Time and Money

The simple fact is that for a company to get ahead in the current business market, a website is a requirement. Considering Drupal web design is a great place to start. To be used to best effect, a website design must take into account a number of factors, including overall appearance, market branding, and the impact of search engine optimization (SEO).

3 Unique Drupal Web Design Features

Drop-in website solutions like the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) make the Internet a piece of cake for small businesses and non-profits alike, since users can select the components of a website they want and tailor a web experience to best fit their clients' needs with ease. These days, other competing technologies like WordPress or Joomla offer similar capabilities, but Drupal website design software has three core features that make it stand out among the crowd.

How to Use Drupal Web Design to Leverage Your Overall Internet Marketing Campaign

As communication technology advances, certain realities remain unchanged. An organizational web site is still the primary communication vehicle between a non-profit and its stakeholders. However, as important as the site is, if your target audience can't find the website, then it can't fulfill its function. A robust SEO strategy can help your organization maintain your site's prominence and Drupal web design is instrumental in executing that strategy.

Non-profit organizations share several core functions: fundraising, volunteer recruitment and management, and operations and communication, among others. Failure in any of these areas will seriously jeopardize the non-profit's viability. Leaders in these organizations must devote significant resources to achieving these goals as efficiently as possible or they may put the central mission at risk.

Alternative Pool Surfaces needed an updated image and look. They wanted to demonstrate professionalism, with a modern, upscale identity that won't be outdated in a few years. Green Bird Media has since redesigned their pool surfacing brand and website to increase customer trust and awareness.

Looking to build an online community around your business, non-profit organization, church, or group? You'll need a Drupal membership directory, and look no further than San Diego Human Resources Roundtable for the latest directory in the ever expanding Drupal portfolio of Green Bird Media.

SDHR's directory web site matches employers with qualified employees. Users can search a resume database of thousands of job seekers' resumes. The site features social networking options which users use to interact with one another.

Green Bird Media is excited to announce the debut of yet another non-profit Drupal web design. The Center for Ethics in Science and Technology's new web site is now available to the public. The web presence encourages web visitors to stick around, explore the site, and come back often.

The International Model United Nations Association educates young people about global issues by hosting three Model United Nations simulations across the United States. IMUNA has teamed up with Green Bird Media to turn their web site into a platform that manages these complex projects efficiently and accurately.

One of the best aspects of the new Internet culture is that a shared sense of community can lead to programs, products, and services that are greater than the sum of their parts. This is most certainly the case with Drupal web development tools.

A non-profit organization's web site needs to do many things: attract attention to the organization and its mission; inform visitors of new developments; and apprise constituents of progress toward shared goals. But the site must avoid siphoning off critical resources from the pursuit of the core mission. Drupal web development can help achieve that very important and vital goal.

Green Bird Media - San Diego SEO services

We have been a leading Drupal web development and website design team for years. Through the growing requests of our clients, both nonprofit and business alike we are now providing "on page" SEO services

The Obama administration has held a long term plan, to present their online presence as more owner and user friendly, by switching to the Drupal content management system last year, and dropping their proprietary system, therefor increasing usability. Taking this plan a step further, the administration, on Wednesday, released some of its custom code "to be used, reviewed and modified by anyone."

Sleepapneahelpcenter.com has educational information about the signs and symptoms of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and the less common Central Sleep Apnea. At least 20 million Americans, or 20-30% of the population suffers from OSA, and a great many cases -an estimated 80%- never get diagnosed.

Things are abuzz in the Green Bird offices as we are getting ready for SandCAMP 2010. We spent the beginning of the week working with some event organizers to get the website up and running. Now we are busy trying to get some good group rates on hotels and tweeting away to Southern California drupalers. We are also perfecting the presentation for Business Secrets: Workflow & Process.

In today's world, businesses must have an internet presence to compete. And in a business environment where your competitor is simply a click away, your website has to be dynamic, attractive, and interactive. So how can your business guarantee that it looks better than the rest? Open source content management is a solution that Fortune 500 companies like Mattel, AT&T and Reuters have turned to.

These hip blankets deserve a hip website. Lullababes creates custom, handmade blankets for babies, children and adults. The blankets are bright, cheerful and soft and are a great gift for a shower or holiday.

The Lullababes website includes an online store, so visitors can order pre-made or custom blankets. We themed a Volusion cart to match the Drupal website, and now the Lullababes founder can add items to the store or blog and update the site herself.

Go to lullababes.com to see the website (& blankets) or view the before and after shots below.

We recently had the pleasure to work with the California Bipolar Foundation, a non profit organization dedicated to research, care & support services, and public education regarding Bipolar Disorder. Their previous website was doing little to help their cause, the new website is an information hub for donors, volunteers, staff members and the people & families affected by Bipolar Disorder.

Ever go to a site that looks beautiful, but somehow still reminds you of the websites you saw in 1997. We have made 2 lists to determine whether a site is Web 1.0 or 2.0. Look through your site to see if you are ready to upgrade to Web 2.0!

Seven tell-tale signs of a web 1.0 site

1. Register usersWe give you the ability to create an online community with your website. One of the greatest functions of our websites is the ability for users to go to the site, register, and become a member who can write blog posts or add their voice to forums. We can enable all kinds of content for registered users. People can create their own identity within your organization's community.

Change.org has a beautiful website, but look at this brilliant call to action on the right sidebar. Not only are you able to see the petitions, but there is a counter to tell how many people have signed a particular petition. Nothing like a little peer motivation to get someone to sign up.

In a sense, you might say that we’re always expecting at Green Bird Media. We keep pretty busy here, delivering user-friendly, transformative web design to companies from San Diego to Kalamazoo. And we do like to talk about our new arrivals in and around San Diego – how they’re improving communities, stimulating growth in tough times, and just plain raising the bar.

We recently launched a website for actor & dancer Michael Apuzzo. The site contains videos of his acting experience as well as a photo gallery with headshots & action shots, a bio, resume, and a schedule of his upcoming events. Michael was in desperate need of a CMS for his website. He is now able to keep his resume up to date without calling on a web designer to update the html files.

As fortune would have it, we had two websites in desperate need of a zipcode search. We really struggled with this module (and of course the requisite trying 10 other combinations first) and thought these instructions on how to integrate the Drupal Location Module might help other developers avoid the black hole:

Susan Rust, Managing Director of Green Bird Media, is a counselor and regular speaker for SCORE San Diego. SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business", is America's premier source of free small business advice for entrepreneurs. SCORE is a volunteer, non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the success of small business.

One way to drive traffic to your website is to engage in social media
campaigns. The challenge is that this arena is new and relatively
untested. There are few best practices and many great stories about a
handful of people making a lot of money. But like all marketing
endeavors, social media should be engaged:

1. Clean mark-up and standards compliant

This feature alone should be reason enough to use Drupal, it's not only great best practice in general, but search engines can easily crawl sites with clean mark-up. There are web standards for a reason, and search engineers are no strangers to these standards, websites that are compliant are more likely to stand the test of time and be looked upon favorably by crawlers.

After DrupalCampLA we became very excited about the Drupal Flag Module. It can work as a bookmarking tool within a site, visible to just a single user, or to everyone. It's beauty is in it's flexibility. It also integrates well with Views, making it easy to create lists of the most flagged content. We found this could be useful in a couple of common website situations:

We took the team up to Irvine last weekend for DrupalCampLA 2009. It was great to see the big turnout this year: about 400 people. Part of the reason we love Drupal so much is the documentation provided by the community, and with more people using Drupal, the community support is just going to get better. Acquia provided great statistics that Drupal is now outperforming Joomla significantly with 400,000 Drupal websites to Joomla's 75,000. More exciting is that companies are now using Drupal for their enterprise solutions.

Green Bird Media was contacted by Mosquito Genie™ inventor Tom Fleming, to create a business web design with e-commerce functionality. The Mosquito Genie™ is a new product, so we started from scratch working closely with Tom to create logo, brand, packaging and a content management system for their new business web design that functions even before production as a source of information and blogging and post-production as a place to purchase the Mosquito Genie™ which is an eco-friendly, mosquito-eliminating outdoor lantern.

If you new website will be undergoing a post-launch online marketing or search engine optimization program, a little awareness at the time of building your website will save you a lot of money and headache in the long run.

GBM launched a new website for San Diego's Thunder Internet Marketing utilizing Wordpress. We are avid users of Drupal, but for some web design projects Wordpress is a more appropriate choice. Thunder started a new site: thunderseo.com to match their branding on Twitter and Facebook. ThunderSEO.com will be used both as a marketing tool and a blogging platform for SEO industry and social media related blog posts.

St. Bartholomew Episcopal Church came to us seeking a warm, friendly church web design with a simple back-end that they could easily update themselves. We came up with a bright and cheery solution on the content management system, Drupal 6. St. Bart's likes to keep their website up-to-date with events, current church projects and church news.

St. Paul's Cathedral-4-the-City Episcopal Anglican Church recently went through a website redesign to become more user-friendly, social oriented and timely. The new church website speaks to a younger audience with links to Facebook, Twitter and podcasts of the sermons.

Finding Your Audience

Companies used to be able to find their audience with a look at their customer base, maybe peeking at the competition and folks could figure out their customer demographics: male, 40-50, likes sports, watches sports 5.5 hours a week.

That's dead now. That same audience now is just as likely to be on hulu.com rather than CBS, satellite tv rather than NBC, and using DV-R to scoot past commercials. Never mind cable, YouTube, and iphone. Then there's blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, and of course Twitter

Today Im attending Gravity Summit at the University of California at Irvine. Sponsored by Rodney Rumford and Beverly Macy of Gravity Summit Media. The keynote speaker is John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer and Brand Economist for Young & Rubmicam and the author of the bestselling book, The Brand Bubble.

The recent launch of MexBizNews.com brought the designers and developers at Green Bird Media into new territory. It is the first site of its kind to come out of our studio. MexBizNews is an aggregated news site for Mexican business news. The publisher, Diane Lindquist writes articles for the site, and pulls in content from other news sources. Once the relevant content is pulled in, it is automatically categorized and tagged based on keywords in the article.

The homepage of your site is an important part of a new web design. Your homepage often contains different material than the interior pages. We like to think of it as a roadmap that guides the visitor to action.

For those who have the budget, A/B testing is when two home pages are designed and then rotated for effectiveness. Especially for those trying to create a specific action: sales, participation, donation, etc., this can be very effective.

So some questions that you may find helpful to consider, does the homepage:

Green Bird Media recently launched a new website for Commercial Lease Advocates, a law firm specializing in lease negotiation for commercial properties. The client wants to use the website as a marketing tool and information base for potential clients. This particular clientele may or may not know that lease negotiation is a way to reduce their fixed costs. Commercial Lease Advocates looked to Green Bird Media to create a welcoming and informative website to spread the word about commercial lease negotiations.

Church Website Design Challenge

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church's in the Menifee Valley turned to Green Bird Media (GBM) for a clean and useful website. St. Stephen’s wanted a church website to speak to current members and to potential members. The parish is relatively small and is looking to attract new and younger members of the community.

Rick - Tao

Green Bird Media has recently launched a website for management consultant, David Norgard of od180. David specializes in organizational development for nonprofit organizations. The new website features case studies, resources, and David’s Management Letter blog with more information about organizational development for nonprofit groups.

While we don't implement a full SEO program, we do incredible website optimization which makes our sites very search engine friendly. This on-page optimization includes the following items to enhance your website for future search engine marketing. Up to 25 pages will be titled and tagged for your keywords and additionally other features upgraded on your website architecturally:

Green Bird Media (GBM) recently designed and developed a new business website for Family Kayak Adventure Center in San Diego, CA. The previous website was all html, and the owner had to manually update the site and upload a page each time changes were made. The move to a Content Management System (CMS) was a great choice for Family Kayak because the owner can edit content, add events to the calendar and post on the company blog all from one user interface.

Green Bird Media has recently launched a revamped website for a big-screen T.V. retailer in Los Angeles. This Drupal site provides a wishlist feature through Pinnacle Cart. Users can browse the store’s stock and create an online wishlist to print and take to the store, or to email to friends and family. The website includes other interesting features such as customized Google maps and an online employment application form.

Frozen in Time Several times a year I do a SCORE workshop on website design, branding and internet marketing which makes for a busy and information-filled six hours. In previous years, the workshops had 30-40 registrants and sometimes standing-room-only. Last week, the seminar drew 9 people. Setting aside Christmas holiday madness, that is still a weak showing by anyone's yardstick.

Green Bird Media has launched another business website this week: HomeandOfficeMakeovers.com for our client Kathleen Lilleeng.

This small but efficient website features a clean design for Kathleen Lilleeng, a local interior designer. HomeandOfficeMakeovers.com includes a web gallery of Kathleen’s work, and many photographs displaying her style throughout the site. Kathleen specializes in recreating space using furniture that you already have, and she stresses the point of making your home peaceful and relaxing.

We work with many non profit organizations when they are ready for a new website. Usually their lack of technology is frustrating their membership and overwhelming the volunteer board members who feel they are communicating with stone tablets and smoke signals. As we begin work and start to flesh out the scope of the project, we often come to an area they had overlooked: Branding themselves.

The older you are, the less familiar a blog is. It's part too-much technology and part humility (what on earth do I have to say and why would anyone read it?) and there seems to be no direct purpose to blogging. While it's true that blogs can be self-referential and self-aggrandizing, the underlying reason for a church or non profit to blog regularly is to post content to your website that is useful and relevant to your audience or industry.

What is CSS?

CSS is a great addition to the web designer's toolbag. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a system of rules that directly effect the display properties of your web pages such as colors, fonts, and layouts on your web browser. CSS style blocks are also commonly referred to as rules. These rules can be embedded into an individual HTML page or placed in an external file that will control many pages on your website. Thus changing a property in one place in the linked style sheet will immediately make that change on every web page that is linked to it.

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Before we were referred to GreenBird Media, we had very bad experiences with web designers, some we were even referred to. We were really unhappy with our previous site, but just hated the thought of spending a bunch of money just to be sorely disappointed again.